View full sizeThe Columbia River runs alongside the U.S. Department of Energy's Hanford site.Terry Richard, The Oregonian

The Government Accountability Office today released a blistering report on the $13.4 billion waste treatment plant being built at the Hanford nuclear reservation, questioning whether the project can succeed and saying billions of dollars of cost increases and long delays "are almost certain to occur."

"By just about any definition, DOE's (waste treatment plant) project at Hanford has not been a well-planned, well-managed, or well-executed major capital construction project," the report says.

"Daunting technical challenges that will take significant effort and years to resolve, combined with a near tripling of project costs and a decade of schedule delays, raise troubling questions as to whether this project can be constructed and operated successfully."

Since 2009, DOE awarded roughly $24.2 million in performance bonuses to Bechtel for meeting cost and schedule targets and resolving technical challenges. But the targets are now at "serious risk" of being missed, the report says, and the challenges "were not resolved after all."

The plant, due to be opened by 2019, is designed to treat highly radioactive waste stored in 177 tanks at the reservation along the Columbia River near Richland, Wash.

View full sizeThe Hanford waste treatment plant site as of March 2012.DOE

It includes three separate processing facilities and is extraordinarily complicated, requiring nearly a million feet of piping. It would combine radioactive material with silica and "vitrify" it into glass logs.

The design includes new technology that will need to operate for decades “with perfect reliability,” the report says, because high radiation levels won’t allow access for maintenance and repair.

Hanford opened in the 1940s as part of the Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb, running nine nuclear reactors during the Cold War years to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. It's now the nation's largest radioactive cleanup site.

The GAO also recommended against resuming construction until key milestones are met, including verifying critical technologies and completing the project's design "to the level established by nuclear industry guidelines."

DOE estimates the plant is more than 55 percent complete, though the design is only 80 percent complete. Civilian nuclear industry guidelines call for designs to be at least 90 percent complete before construction begins, the report noted.

Earlier this week, the Department of Energy and Washington state announced that construction of the nuclear waste cleanup plant could safely "begin to be ramped back up."

In its response to the report, DOE said it would allow limited construction activities, such as completing structural walls at the high-level treatment plant, while "taking into account the remaining open technical issues."

The accountability office said that approach "appears reasonable," but said DOE should monitor to make sure construction doesn't go beyond the approved list "until the technical and management issues are satisfactorily resolved."

DOE also said it would work to improve contractor performance evaluations, and would review incentive payments made since January 2009.